ences.

and other Northern cities.* So much pressure was brought to bear on Congress that a committee was sent to Louisiana to adjust the differA compromise, known as the "Wheeler Adjustment," was proposed by which all the Democratic members were seated, provided the Democratic majority would not impeach Kellogg for acts committed prior to the adjustment. This adjustment was accepted by the Democrats, but Kellogg and the State auditor were afterward found guilty of embezzling public funds and both officials were recommended for impeachment, though not convicted because of lack of preparation of the case against them.||

In South Carolina we perhaps find the most appalling and disgraceful conditions. Under Robert K. Scott, an Ohio carpet-bagger and a former chief of the Freedmen's Bureau, and Franklin J. Moses, Jr., "scalawag, licentiate and debauché," the "Robber Governor," the State treasury was looted by the "legislators" who made no pretense of honesty. These patriotic statesmen openly said that they intended to "squeeze the state as dry

*

Mayes, Lamar, p. 208 et seq.; Godwin, Life of W. C. Bryant, vol. ii.

The members of which were Hoar, Wheeler, Frye, Foster, Phelps, Potter and Marshall.

McPherson, Handbook of Politics, 1876, p. 200, Fleming, Documentary History, vol. ii., pp. 157– 160; Andrews, Last Quarter-Century, vol. i., pp. 159-167.

| Phelps, Louisiana, pp. 385–387; Nordhoff, The Cotton States, pp. 41-43, 63-68; Cox, Three Decades, pp. 555-570; Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction, pp. 259–265.

VOL. IX-31

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as a sucked orange," and one of these eminent personages asserted that "South Carolina ought not to be a state if she cannot support her statesmen." In 1867 the State debt was $5,800,000, but.by the end of 1871 this had become $29,000,000, actual and contingent, and there were so many other obligations that no estimate was ever made of them.* The taxable property exclusive of slaves was $316,000,000 in 1860 on which the annual taxes amounted to $392,000; by 1871 the property values had been reduced to $184,000,000 but the taxes had been increased over five-fold, to about $2,000,000. The public printing for one administration cost more than it had for the previous 70 years, and in one session the legislature spent $95,000 for furniture alone, $80,000 of which was spent to furnish the homes of the members. house was refurnished, not so much on an elegant as on a costly scale, some of the items being as follows: Chandeliers cost from $1,500 to $2,000; the $2 window curtains were replaced by others costing from $600 to $1,500; chairs that had cost $1 were discarded and $60 chairs were used instead; $200 sofas took the place of $4 benches; $5 clocks were exchanged for some costing $600 as were $4 looking-glasses for $600 mirrors, and $10 desks for $175

The state

* Pike, Prostrate State, chap. xvii.; Scott, Repudiation of State Debts, pp. 78-93; Cox, Three Decades, pp. 501-507; Governor Chamberlain's inaugural address of December 1, 1874, quoted in Walter Allen, Governor Chamberlain's Adminis tration in South Carolina, pp. 10-30.

† Pike, chap. xxxi.

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desks, hand-painted cuspidors at $50 apiece for the members, etc. Beside this each member was furnished a $10 gold pen, a $25 calendar ink-stand and a copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary and free use of railroads and telegraph lines. Even the private accounts and gambling losses of the members were paid.*

The legislature invested several millions in railroads and subsequently waived its claim to any share in the roads; it appropriated $1,250,000 to redeem $500,000 in State bank notes and used the securities belonging to the educational fund for State purposes. It also appropriated $700,000 to buy land that was worth $50,000 to give to the negroes. Over $800,000 was paid for lands by the State Treasurer but of this amount about $225,000 was never accounted for. Of the $575,000 supposed to have been actually paid for land about $400,000 represented graft and the balance the actual value of the land purchased.† Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on supplies for bars and restaurants that the "legislators" might refresh themselves and their friends with food, wines, liquors and cigars. Forty bedrooms were furnished as "committee" rooms each session, at the close of which the "statesmen" carried home the furniture. But the most ludicrous part of the whole affair was the character of the supplies furnished. "Bills

* Ku Klux Report, minority, p. 539; Pike, Prostrate State, p. 199 et seq.

Pike, chaps. xix., xx., xxii.

made by officials and legislators and paid by the state reveal a queer medley! Costly liquors, wines, cigars, baskets of champagne, hams, oysters, rice, flour, lard, coffee, tea, sugar, suspenders, linen-bosom shirts, cravats, collars, gloves (masculine and feminine, by the box), perfumes, bustles, corsets, palpitators, embroidered flannel, ginghams, silks, velvets, stockings, chignons, gowns, chemises, garters, fans, gold watches and chains, diamond finger-rings and ear-rings, Russia leather workboxes, hats, bonnets; in short every article of furniture and house furnishing from a full parlor set to a baby's swinging cradle, not omitting a $100 metallic coffin."*

Pike, in speaking of the State legislature says: "Here sit one hundred and twenty-four members. Of these twenty-three are white men

Of the remaining one hundred and one "ninety-four are colored and seven are their white allies.

The

speaker is black, the clerk is black, the door-keepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of the Ways and Means is black and the chaplain is coal-black. At some of the desks sit colored men whose types it would be hard to find outside of Congo, whose costume, usages, attitudes, and expression only befit the forecastle of a

*Avary, Dixie After the War, chap. xxx.; Fleming, Documentary History, vol. ii., pp. 59-69; Rhodes, vol. vii., pp. 142-168. See also the Report of the Joint Investigating Committee on Public Frauds * made to the General Assembly

*

*

of South Carolina at the Regular Session, 1877-78, extracts from which are quoted in Scott's Repudiation of State Debts, pp. 313–316.

buccaneer." "The whole of the late administration, which terminated its existence in November, 1872, was a morass of rottenness. They plunder and glory in it. They steal and defy you to prove it. Nearly two millions per annum are raised for State expenses when $400,000 formerly sufficed

The new Governor has the reputation of spending $30,000 or $40,000 a year on a salary of $3,500 This is the kind of moral education the ignorant blacks of the State are getting by being made legislators.'

In 1871 the legislature accused Governor Scott of misusing public funds and he in turn called the legislature corrupt; a quarrel consequently ensued and in December of that year impeachment proceedings were brought against Scott and N. G. Parker, the State treasurer, for fraud in connection with an issue of bonds. But with the liberal use of money the proceedings were beaten.f In 1872 the conservative element gave only half-hearted support to the Liberal Republican candidate Tomlinson, and Franklin J. Moses, Jr., the regular

*The Prostrate State, pp. 13-15, 26, 28, 29, 50 (D. Appleton & Co.). See also Andrew D. White, Autobiography, vol. i., p. 175.

Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia, 1871, p. 700; Allen, Governor Chamberlain's Administration, pp. 145-152.

469

Republican nominee, won easily. In

*

1874 Daniel 1874 Daniel H. Chamberlain was elected governor by the regular Republicans and the opposition gained in the legislature, only 77 of the 157 members being negroes. After his inauguration Chamberlain vetoed several bills of plunder and refused to sign the tax and supply bill which carried extravagant appropriations.† He refused to sign the commissions of W. J. Whipper, an unscrupulous negro politician and ex-governor F. J. Moses, Jr., who had been nominated and elected judges of the circuit court by the Republicans of the legislature. He also supported State Treasurer ruptionists tried to remove,|| and he Cardozo, whom the Republican cordisbanded several companies of colored militia who upon investigation he found to have started an outbreak which was charged against the whites. Thus Chamberlain started the State on the road toward resuming a government by its native intelligent whites. This was not, however, to be accomplished without a bitter struggle, which will be related in connection with the presidential election of 1876.

* Allen, p. 9.

† Ibid, p. 184 et seq.

Ibid, pp. 38-45, 192-219, 228 et seq.
Ibid, pp. 80-87.

§ By a proclamation dated January 28, 1875, Ibid, pp. 67-70.

470

Party nominees and platforms

As has been said, the elections of 1874 throughout the country showed an overwhelming reaction against Grant, and most of the States of the Union, even Massachusetts, were carried by the Democrats. In the Fortyfourth Congress there was a large Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and the Republican majority in the Senate was considerably lessened. The Democrats, therefore, went into the presidential campaign of 1876 determined not only to hold the ground they had, but also to gain the other States still under the radicals - Louisiana, Florida Florida and South Carolina.*

Dunning, in his Reconstruction, pp. 281-282, says: "That the conflict of the races in the South was not yet entirely settled in favor of the whites was indicated by the presence of seven negroes in the House, two from South Carolina, and one each from North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; while in the Senate a single member, Bruce, of Mississippi, still preserved the foothold which his race had gained in that reluctant body." See also McPherson, Handbook of Politics, 1876, p. 139; McClure's Recollections, p. 253.

At the convention of the Republican party James G..Blaine was called the "plumed knight" by Robert G. Ingersoll, in a speech nominating him as the presidential candidate.

The fourth paragraph of the Democratic platform reads as follows:

"Reform is necessary to rebuild and establish in the hearts of the whole people the Union elever. years ago happily rescued from the danger of a secession of States, but now to be saved from a corrupt centralism which, after inflicting upon ten States the rapacity of carpet-bag tyrannies, has honey-combed the offices of the Federal Government itself with incapacity, waste and fraud, in

* McClure's Recollections, pp. 425-428; Crawford's Blaine, pp. 381-401; Ridpath's Blaine, pp. 133-137.

fected States and muncipalities with the contagion of misrule, and locked fast the prosperity of an industrious people in the paralysis of 'hard times.""

The platform denounced the failure to resume specie payments, demanded public economics, flayed the tariff as a "master-piece of injustice, and inequality and false pretense," and called for many reforms particularly "in the higher grades of the public service" further stating, in advocating a change to Democratic rule, that "the annals of this Republic show a disgrace and censure of a Vice-President; a late speaker of the House of Representatives marketing his rulings as a presiding officer; three Senators profiting secretly by their votes as law makers; five chairmen of the leading committees of the late House of Representatives exposed in jobbery; a late Secretary of the Treasury forcing balances in the public accounts; a late Attorney-General misappropriating public funds; a Secretary of the Navy enriched or enriching friends by percentages levied off the profits of contractors with his Department; an ambassador to England in a dishonorable speculation; the President's private secretary barely escaping conviction upon trial for guilty complicity in frauds upon the revenue; a Secretary of War impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors," etc.

The Republican platform as usual reviewed the party history and defended its actions; it declared against the application of public funds for the benefit of sectarian educational institutions; demanded legislation to secure the prohibition of "that relic of barbarism, polygamy," and in the fifteenth and sixteenth paragraphs made the following statements:

"We sincerely deprecate all sectional feeling and tendencies. We therefore note with deep solicitude that the Democratic party counts, as its chief hope of success, upon the electoral vote of a united South, secured through the efforts of those who were recently arrayed against the nation; and

471

we invoke the earnest attention of the country to the grave truth that a success thus achieved would reopen sectional strife and imperil national honor and human rights.

"We charge the Democratic party with being the same in character and spirit as when it sympathized with treason; with making its control of the House of Representatives the triumph and opportunity of the nation's recent foes; with reasserting and applauding in the National Capitol the sentiments of unrepentant rebellion; with sending Union soldiers to the rear and promoting Confederate soldiers to the front; with deliberately proposing to repudiate the plighted faith of the Government; with being equally false and imbecile upon the overshadowing financial question; with thwarting the ends of justice by its partisan mismanagements and obstruction of investigation; with proving itself, through the period of its ascendency in the lower House of Congress, utterly incompetent to administer the government; and we warn the country against trusting a party thus alike unworthy, recreant and incapable."*

In their campaign the Democrats were greatly aided by the numerous public scandals which were unearthed during Grant's term of office, and which reflected very seriously on the administration. Beside the customhouse frauds, the "salary grab," and Crédit Mobilier scandals, the Sanborn and Jayne contracts, the Safe Burglary frauds, the Seal-Lock frauds and the Subsidy frauds, in which some of the government officials were involved, there were also Indian agent peculations and much crookedness in appointments under the "spoils system." But the greatest scandal was

*

Stanwood, History of Presidential Elections, pp. 302-327 and History of the Presidency, pp. 356-393; Rhodes, vol. vii., pp. 206-218; Paul L. Haworth, The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876, chaps. i.-iii.; Blaine, vol. ii., pp. 567-580; Hamilton's Blaine, pp. 394-402; Bigelow's Tilden, vol. i., pp. 299-313, and The Writ ings and Speeches of S. J. Tilden, vol. ii., pp. 354373; Hoar, Autobiography, vol. i., pp. 375-383; Foulke's Morton, vol. ii.